Elevating Financial Education in Virginia: A Decision-First Approach for a Data-Rich World

A New Era Demands a New Emphasis

In an information age defined by instant access and limitless content, the benefits of knowledge are accompanied by a significant cost: our children’s shortening attention spans. This digital saturation represents the negative underbelly of modern digital communication, presenting an immediate and ongoing challenge to educators. It is the antithesis of financial success because the core principles of personal finance—such as saving and living below one's means—depend entirely on the ability to plan into the future and delay gratification.

This conflict is more than anecdotal; research consistently shows the detrimental impact of fragmented attention on executive function and long-term goal setting, skills essential for financial discipline.

In this challenging new environment, financial education is more vital than ever, but the method must change. While Virginia's Economics and Personal Finance (19262) standards are excellent, the focus must shift from mere knowledge acquisition to fostering the higher-order judgment required to overcome the impulse for immediacy. Our new goal is an approach empowering students to cut through the noise and strategically see into the future for financial stability.

Virginia’s Standards: A Strong Foundation

Virginia’s required personal finance curriculum ensures all high school students graduate with a grounding in key financial topics:

• Budgeting and money management

• Credit and debt

• Saving and investing

• Insurance and risk

• Consumer rights

• Economic systems and principles

With 165 detailed standards, the 19262 framework builds essential content literacy and introduces students to real-world terminology, financial institutions, and practices. These are foundational skills for responsible adulthood.

A Cognitive Lens: What Bloom’s Taxonomy Reveals

To assess the depth of cognitive engagement in these standards, we applied Bloom’s Taxonomy, a well-established framework in educational theory. Bloom’s ranks learning tasks from lower- to higher-order thinking:

Lower cognition levels: Remember, Understand

Medium cognition levels: Apply, Analyze

Higher cognition levels: Evaluate, Create

Each Virginia standard was classified by its highest implied cognitive level. The goal was to determine how many encourage judgment and decision-making, rather than just memorization or comprehension.

Key Findings:

• 45% of standards fall in the lower Remember and Understand cognition categories.

• 25% fall into the lower medium Apply category 

• 15% fall into the higher medium Analyze category.

• Only 15% reach Evaluate or Create, the higher cognition levels most strongly associated with personal decision-making.

The results are not surprising. Content delivery remains a critical component of standards-based education. In earlier eras, the primary obstacle was access to information—once students found it and understood it, the decision-making process was relatively straightforward. But in today’s data-abundant world, that dynamic has flipped. Information is readily available; the greater challenge now is exercising sound judgment in an environment saturated with stimuli and constant demands on our attention.

In an age where GenAI can deliver mostly precise answers instantly, students must go beyond consuming knowledge. They must know how to frame questions, curate outputs, assess tradeoffs, and tailor solutions to their lives. The goal of any curriculum should be twofold: equip students with practical skills while empowering educators to reach a diverse classroom of learners. Given the fixed time budget of any course, the challenge is not just what goes into the curriculum—but what must come out to make room. This is where GenAI becomes the teacher’s strategic ally, enabling students to self-teach lower-order tasks like Remember and Understand, freeing educators to focus more deeply on higher-level cognitive skills such as Evaluate and Create.

This approach enables “flipping the classroom” — where students absorb core content independently, building lower-level cognition (Remember and Understand), while classroom time is reserved for higher-order thinking tasks like Evaluate and Create, where active decision-making and personalized guidance matter most.

Why Decision Skills Matter More Than Ever

In the past, learning to gather information was central to education. Today, GenAI platforms like ChatGPT gather it for us. Students no longer need to memorize data; they need to understand how to prompt technology wisely, validate results, and apply outcomes to real-life decisions.

This cognitive shift moves the emphasis from:

• Information collection → Insight generation

• Content recall → Contextual judgment

• Rule-following → Adaptation and goal alignment

Students are overwhelmed not by lack of information, but by too much of it. Success depends on decision frameworks promoting focus, relevance, and long-term thinking. That means curricula should increasingly weight higher-order cognitive tasks—not to replace lower-order tasks, but to reflect new realities.

To emphasize an important nuance: Language acquisition associated with the language arts and abstract thinking associated with Mathematics are essential for establishing a student's foundational cognitive abilities. We recommend building financial education on this foundation. Shift financial education to leverage the abundance of information and the cognitive tools offered by GenAI in today's world. Additionally, incorporating GenAI into financial education prepares students for a future where GenAI is increasingly essential in the workforce.

How PFR Complements the Standards

Virginia’s Economics and Personal Finance (19262) standards offer students a strong knowledge foundation across critical topics like budgeting, credit, insurance, investing, and consumer responsibility. But in today’s fast-moving and data-rich environment, students also need to practice decision-making with tools that mirror the complexity of real life. This is where Personal Finance Reimagined (PFR) adds measurable value—not by replacing the standards, but by building on them.

Curriculum Integration and Cognitive Lift

PFR delivers a comprehensive financial decision-making program designed to align seamlessly with existing EPF topics. Modules include decision simulations and instructional tools for:

• Budgeting and saving

• Practical high-impact financial decisions, like buying a car, renting vs owning a home, buying a pet, wedding planning, etc.

• Credit and responsible borrowing

• Insurance and risk tradeoffs

• Career and college ROI analysis

• Investing and long-term planning

Each topic is supported by:

• A structured decision-making framework teaching students how to evaluate tradeoffs and align choices with goals.

• The Definitive Choice app, a patented smartphone-based tool that simulates real-world financial decisions using personalized inputs.

• The textbook Making Choices, Making Money, which blends behavioral science, economic reasoning, and neuroscience. It also integrates GenAI and prompt engineering to help students learn to partner with these modern tools to extend their reasoning ability.

• Plug-and-play materials for teachers, including test banks, presentations, and student worksheets.

While many existing standards emphasize Bloom’s mid-level cognition (e.g., Apply or Understand), PFR consistently operates at the Analyze, Evaluate, and Create levels. In doing so, it cultivates students’ decision fluency and improves their readiness to act with confidence in high-stakes situations.

Real Impact: What Students Are Saying

In recent implementations at college and high schools—where the PFR curriculum is embedded in a foundational personal finance course—student feedback has confirmed its transformative value:

“Definitely one of the best classes I have taken in terms of preparing for life.”

“The Definitive Choice app and the way we simulated real-life decisions was so valuable.”

"I enjoyed learning to use GenAI in a way that makes learning fun."

“You actually learn valuable long-term skills from this class.”

“This class should be taken by every student.”

These aren’t generic endorsements. They’re reflections of how a structured, decision-focused approach can improve clarity, motivation, and long-term planning. These comments reflect PFR's commitment to being student and teacher-first, an organization born from educators, for educators. Several students pointed to their favorite simulations—planning for weddings, choosing housing, comparing job offers—as moments where abstract content became personally meaningful.

Call to Action: Shift the Weight, Not the Standard

Virginia’s curriculum has built an excellent foundation. But the information-abundant, attention-starved world our children are inheriting demands a different approach. Helping students develop a consistent, repeatable decision-making approach better builds upon that foundation.

This is not about replacing what works—it’s about rebalancing priorities to reflect the world students face. That world demands:

• Better judgment under uncertainty

• Confident use of decision support tools

• The ability to revisit choices and adapt with purpose

By integrating the decision-first approach, Virginia can lead the way in preparing students not just to understand finance—but to live it with competence and confidence.

Let’s teach the next generation not just to know more, but to decide better.

Thank you for the opportunity to advise the Commonwealth of Virginia on its future financial education strategy.

Appendix: Methodology and Resources

Methodology: Bloom’s Taxonomy Analysis of Virginia’s EPF Standards

To evaluate the cognitive depth of Virginia’s Economics and Personal Finance (19262) standards, we conducted a structured Bloom’s Taxonomy analysis using both GenAI-powered tools and expert human review.

The process began by ingesting the foundational course content embedded in the official IMS Common Cartridge (.imscc) file, publicly available via Virginia’s CTE Resource Center: Economics and Personal Finance Course Standards – Virginia CTE

Using this standardized curriculum dataset, we parsed and categorized all 165 instructional standards. Each standard was analyzed for its highest implied level of cognitive demand using the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy hierarchy:

• Remember

• Understand

• Apply

• Analyze

• Evaluate

• Create

A GenAI assistant trained in educational taxonomy was used to conduct the first-pass classification. This included the detection of Bloom-aligned action verbs and their variants—e.g., “describe,” “explain,” “construct,” “evaluate”—with each mapped to its corresponding Bloom level based on established academic guidance (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001).

Following this AI-assisted categorization, each classification underwent manual quality control, challenge, and validation by Jeff Hulett, an experienced educator and behavioral economist. Edge cases were reviewed for context and intent, ensuring that no classification rested solely on surface-level verbs. Special attention was paid to over-classifications of “Create” or “Evaluate,” ensuring that those labels reflected true student decision-making, not mere explanation of past decisions.

This hybrid approach showcases how GenAI can be used as a high-leverage tool for advanced cognitive tasks, enabling educators and researchers to scale robust content analysis while preserving accuracy and judgment through human oversight.

The result is a defensible, transparent assessment of how Virginia’s standards distribute across the cognitive spectrum—and a foundation for informed discussion about future curriculum design.

Resources for the Curious

Virginia Department of Education. “Economics and Personal Finance (6120/19262).” CTE Resource Center, 2024. https://www.cteresource.org/career-clusters/finance/economics-and-personal-finance

The full set of Virginia’s Economics and Personal Finance (19262) standards was obtained from the Virginia Department of Education via the CTE Resource Center. This official curriculum defines the instructional competencies required for high school financial literacy and economics courses across the Commonwealth.

Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64(1), 135–168. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750

Defines executive functions—specifically inhibitory control (self-control and focused attention) and working memory—as the top-down mental processes essential for resisting impulses, staying focused despite distraction, and engaging in future planning, all of which are critical for long-term financial discipline.

Anderson, Lorin W., and David R. Krathwohl, editors. A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Longman, 2001.

Provides the revised framework for classifying educational goals, widely used for aligning curriculum with cognitive complexity.

Khan, Salman. The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined. Twelve, 2012.

Advocates for “flipping the classroom,” where direct instruction moves outside the classroom and class time is used for high-engagement, high-order thinking.

Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. Jossey-Bass, 2009.

Explores how students process information, highlighting the need for structured thinking over rote content delivery.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Discusses the psychological underpinnings of decision-making, explaining why even informed individuals struggle with complex judgments.

Hulett, Jeff. Making Choices, Making Money. Personal Finance Reimagined, 2023.

Provides a practical framework for teaching financial decision-making, grounded in behavioral science, choice theory, and modern cognitive models.

OECD. Future of Education and Skills 2030: OECD Learning Compass. OECD, 2019.

Introduces a global framework for future-ready education, emphasizing agency, co-agency, and the ability to navigate complex, changing environments.